In the midst of winter training doldrums we are often reminded that sustaining motivation can be just as important as building fitness. This is especially true coming out of the off-season, when you might be searching for new goals or still recovering from a spell of bike racing burnout.

At times the best strategy for building both momentum and motivation may be sticking to a precise routine, but other times the best option is to do something slightly outrageous, and possibly ill-advised. This is the strategy that the team took one weekend in January, for a combination of Zwift centuries, long hikes, and ill-advised running races.

Words by: Cullen MacDonald, Corey Williams, Barb Millot, and Matthew Vandivort

Cullen Does One Zwift Century

I hate riding indoors. I hate it almost as much as I hate riding in the cold. But right now, I’m stoked on bikes. My motivation to train and ride and get fit and stick with it is exceptionally high. And so when Matt jokingly suggested we do a team Zwift Century during a day of terrible weather, I committed. The morning of, I downed a big bowl of oatmeal, did my Motiv stretches and warm up and hopped on the bike. We use Zoom for all our team calls and we’ve started using it to do indoor group rides (I’m trying to make “Zwoom” -- Zwift+Zoom -- happen). For the first hour, a few teammates hopped on the group call while they were doing their Fetty approved/prescribed workouts. The miles ticked by and just before the 60 minute with 20 miles already clocked, I decided that I was officially doing the century and announced as such out loud to everyone on the call.

Crap. I have to do it now I thought to myself.

The longest I have ever sat on an indoor trainer was two hours and as I approached that point, still sticking to the 20mph average, a surge of confidence and “stoke” washed over me. At about the same moment, Matt announced he would join in the the century too to keep me company.

Three hours in, everyone else had hopped off the conference call. Matt and I had both stopped talking to each other and focused on whatever bullshit Netflix show each of us were bingeing.

Throughout the day, I relied heavily on Fetty’s number one trainer tip: get off and walk around for a minute or two. I also made sure to not forget to eat. I took a real break off the bike around 3:30 and 70 miles in to simulate a longer cafe stop and eat a bigger meal. All in, I was off the bike for maybe a total of an hour through the six hour ordeal.

Matt pointed out that I was an idiot for not picking the flattest route in Zwift, and I promptly made my way over to it (you’ll notice that after 65 miles of rolling hills, my Strava elevation chart went pancake flat for the final third of the ride). We also learned that if you find a big group going the speed you want, the drafting simulation is probably a little too helpful.

The last two hours dragged by. Things were starting to hurt. I was exhausted. I was ready to be done, but with a teammate literally watching me, neither of us could give up. When I hit 90 miles I redoubled my commitment. When I hit 98 miles I couldn’t stop laughing. With the team cheering me on from our Slack, and Matt congratulating me, my stoke cup hath runneth over.

”That was dumb” was my named ride in Strava. It was dumb. Zwift is dumb. Being proud of doing a fake digital century was dumb. Doing it on a conference call was dumb. But after a year of dealing with intense burnout and lack of motivation to train, this felt like a breakthrough. Like I had figured out where to find the part of cycling I haven't felt in a while. I’m going to do a Zwift century again. Soon.

Corey Runs a Half Marathon without Training

Around the time of the NYC Marathon this past November, though my volunteer experience and following endless hours of coverage of the race, I found myself re-motivated to run with a long term plan of tackling the course again in 2021. I renewed my NYRR membership and signed up for a handful of winter and spring races to check off some of the 9+1 program requirements that will afford me guaranteed entry into the race. Then, I promptly forgot about these races as I threw myself back into on-the-bike training in preparation for a few lofty goals for the upcoming bike racing season. Sure, I ran a few miles for a few days when visiting my parents for Christmas sans bicycle and have overseen the weekly meetings of my students’ running club, but “training” this was not.

I was abruptly reminded of my pending date with this past weekend’s Fred Lebow Half-Marathon about a week ahead of time when I received a reminder to pick up my race number. Dutifully, I complied. In the week leading up to the race, I was never sure that I was going to actually race, though I did conveniently forget to mention it on our weekly coaching call (sorry Fetty) and took it very easy on the bike on Saturday as a precaution.

When Sunday arrived, I woke up, drank a strong cup of coffee, slathered my legs in PR Lotion, and set off for Central Park full of all the hubris I would need to carry myself 13.1 miles by foot for no good reason beyond “this seemed like a good idea when I signed up.” It was cold, but all the runners I encountered that morning were in good spirits, spirits that would be tested as we tackled two complete loops of the park with an additional trip over Harlem Hill thrown in for good measure. As the race started, I planted myself next to the 1:45 pacer to give myself a reasonable and achievable goal for the race. Two miles later, I found myself chasing down the 1:40 pacer and then surging ahead in pursuit of the 1:35 group. I would pay for this soon enough.

I managed to run a semi-decent 7 miles before my legs rebelled for the first time. From that point on, I found myself walking for a minute or so before running for another mile and repeating until the finish line. As I was walking at the base of Harlem Hill in the last mile, I heard the 1:40 group coming up behind me. Channeling my fiercest Arya Stark, I cried, “Not today!” to no one in particular and surged over the hill and through the line where I was greeted with a high five from Senator Chuck Schumer (random as hell) and an endlessly long commute home thanks to a water main break and subway closure (much less random). Tough? Yes. Would I do it again? History suggests that I will. Was it worth it? Totally.

Corey in action at the 2019 NYC Half Marathon (the full Journal entry)

Barb goes to Boulder to Exercise All Day

When my husband announced he planned to work all day on Sunday, I decided to head up to Boulder, as I used to do in my triathlete days, for a walk with an old pal. I popped into my favorite coffee shop in town, Boxcar, and hung out with a second Americano and a lovely grapefruit breakfast cake (this is such a more honest way to describe a muffin, sadly!), and after 30 minutes I said to myself - hey, I’m in Boulder, the weather is nice, I might as well do an old favorite hike! Mount Sanitas is a quick but strenuous hike up a local mountain just outside downtown Boulder. Since I was on a schedule, I decided to go fast. It was so much fun! I forgot how large the steps are but it was great. I then sprinted down the trail because I had to get to my friend Cathy’s house for a walk.

At Cathy’s we walked a leisurely 2 miles with her very cute Black Lab, Blaze, but I was already pretty tired. It was nice. Views were good and the weather was warming up.

Seemed like a good time for a bike ride.

Following our walk, I headed to my favorite old bagel shop in Boulder, Moe’s (this is not a New York shop but I do like it). I ate a bagel with peanut butter in about 30 seconds. I changed clothes and drove down to the Marshall Mesa Trailhead with my gravel bike. One of my goals for this year is to do more dirt riding on my cross and / or gravel bike so that by the time cross season starts I’m super comfortable and my skills are on point. The weather was nice - low 40’s, sunny, not super windy. I rode a 17 mile loop on a mix of singletrack and doubletrack. It was so much fun! I had ridden my mountain bike there before and it was a bit boring, it’s just not technical enough to be challenging on a mountain bike. But on a cross bike it was awesome. I also noticed on the switchbacks I felt the cross bike was easier to maneuver. I would highly recommend trying this! The ride took a little over 90 minutes. When I got back to my car I was almost dead. I finished the day with over 20,000 steps, almost 200 stories of climbing on foot, and 16.6 miles on dirt. It was great, but I’m exhausted!

Matt does a Double Zwift Century. No, really.

I have a very silly tradition of doing a Zwift century just about every January. It is not a particularly logical tradition. And I’m not sure it really does much in the way of building fitness. But there has always been something about spending four or five hours on the trainer in January that seemed to signify that I’m ready to start training properly for the season ahead.

Of course, it was also a tradition that I was also perfectly happy forgetting. In fact, I had no plans to do a Zwift century this year. When Cullen first mentioned it on TBD Slack, I took it purely as a joke - poking fun at the fact that I’m the only crazy person on TBD doing Zwift centuries. Only when he brought it up again mid-Zwoom (the Zwift + Zoom jargon that Cullen has dedicated himself to making a thing) did I let the idea on another 100 miler on Zwift start to creep into my head.

Thankfully, it seems that doing a Zwift century has gotten at least marginally easier in the past year. There is now a truly pancake flat course to choose (Tempus Fugit, which rises just 52 feet over 10.7 miles) and - maybe this is wrong - but drafting seems to have a more significant impact than I remembered - my strategy was to more or less always be in a draft. Either way, with Cullen providing some mix of support and peer-pressure, Saturday’s Zwift century cruised by particularly quickly.

And then on Sunday I got back on the trainer…. and did it all again? It once again wasn’t planned, but I started watching Game of Thrones (a decade late) and it proved all the motivation that I needed to sit through another few hours on the trainer for a weekend with nearly nine hours on the trainer. It seems more than slightly crazy to describe it, especially since my average weekly training duration usually hovers in the 8-10 hour range. But sometimes when the pedals turn easily, they just turn… even if the whole workout is slightly illogical. Here’s to keeping the tradition alive for one more year….